I pen down my thoughts on life and entrepreneurship here.

Tag Archives: Pinterest

Yesterday, JinnyboyTv Channel on YouTube released their latest work: Only in Malaysia, which was a really good watch. When I explored deeper into their channel, came across the video called My Generation, and I have to say, it was a really good video. Very well done!

Good times. :)

Not surprisingly, it became one of the most shared video on the Malaysian Channel when it was released. Ultimately, what contributed to that was the fact that the video touches the heart of the generation (late 80s to early 90s) and that we can relate to it. It makes us want to share it even without the social sharing buttons. Brings to another point which is important, we have to help our users or anyone who use our product and services to express themselves, and give them a reason to share them with their social networks.

Pinterest, which is the fastest growing website of all time, does this very well, and is definitely something that everyone can learn from.

Takeaway:

Create something that your target audience can relate to and understand.

Help your users express themselves, and give them a reason to come back.

This represents an personal opinion. If you have read this far, you should definitely follow me on Twitter.

It’s nothing new about websites copying the successful ones, but the commotion came from a blatant copy of the original site, which caused quite a stir among the community, and thus the discussion of “Singaporeans” are uncreative has resurfaced, again.

As the author puts it: “I’m not very fond of copycats. I think if one were to do a startup, it should be cutting edge instead of trailing behind the footsteps of a giant.”

Source: Twitter

Of course, there are some discussions on Twitter as well, and the site owner of Singterest responded saying that they launched it the same week the idea was conceived, and that now they wished that they launch it on April 1st instead as a April’s fool’s gift.

What are my thoughts?

Execution matter, and Singterest should be creditted for it.

For one, Singterest put up the site in just a matter of a few days since their decision to build one that is localized to the Singapore community. Personally, I think this is a job well done. A few days ago, I spoke to someone who gave a very good advice to the Singapore community: “Just do it. Dont hold back and not launch your product. Unless you have a superstar team and everyone is super focused on it, nobody really cares.”.

So what if Singterest is a complete ripoff? What matters now is that, they have a working site, they have users (i think), and it would only take them a few more days to “localize” it, adding on a Singapore touch to it. And personally, I think this should definitely deserve some credit, as Mark Zuckerberg puts it: Keep focused and keep shipping.

On creativity, and stealing.

Very few ideas are new nowadays, so what really sell nowadays are the UI as well as the marketing. For now, I guess what startups founder can be creative about is on innovating the delivering of an existing business model, or innovating on its user interface. For Singapore, I think the community is getting there. But we have to think the Asian way. Asia is not the States, and Techinasia also published an excellent article on this topic, where we should leverage on our “home advantage” and build something that suits the Asian ecosystem.

On copying and stealing, personally, I think there is nothing wrong in copying, as Steve Jobs puts it in 1996, good artist copy, great artist steals. While Singterest received some reprimands from the community for blatantly copying the whole Pinterest site, including their tagline, most of the startups now copy some components and designs of their websites from other existing websites too. Perhaps Singterest shouldnt have copied the whole site and release it to the public, just like that. Let’s see if Singterest will come out with something different in the next couple of days.

This represents a personal opinion. If you have read this far, you should definitely follow me on Twitter.